“Together with artists, we imagine theatre that has never been done in places where it has never happened.” — Anne Hamburger,
Executive Artistic Director, En Garde Arts
current productions
The Matter of the Disappearance of Michael Anthony Smith, Jr.
December 2nd - 19th
Theatre Row | Manhattan
410 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036
BUY TICKETS HERE!
Written by Bill Martin
Developed & Directed by Seth Bockley
Welcome Home. We Thought You Were Dear. Stay For Dinner?
En Garde Arts reunites with acclaimed director Seth Bockley (BASETRACK Live, Wilderness) for the world premiere of Bill Martin's The Matter of the Disappearance of Michael Anthony Smith Jr.
Featuring some of New York's most celebrated theatrical designers and a dynamic ensemble of downtown performers, this haunting new production combines projections, inventive design, and live performance to create a world where memory and reality collide.
At the heart of this story is a long-presumed dead soldier who walks back into his family's life. His wife has remarried. His son has grown up. And what should be a miraculous homecoming quickly becomes something far more unsettling.
Every Family has its Ghosts. This One Rang The Door Bell.
Days to remember forever
may 30th - june 27
ellen stewart Theater - La Mama Etc.
Written by Chuck Mee
Adapted & Directed by Anne Bogart
The World Premiere of Days to Remember Forever reunites two of the defining voices of American theatre: Anne Bogart and Chuck Mee. Adapted and directed by Anne Bogart, Days to Remember Forever is a portrait of an artist forged in the crucible of illness on a voyage from monotony into wonder. Eccentric characters, unusual creatures, and serendipitous encounters guide the audience toward the rediscovery of art, romance, and our own creative vitality.
Mee’s relationship with the city transforms the everyday into a living tapestry of contradiction and engagement. Through his eyes, we see how the metropolis breathes: café tables, the noise, collisions of strangers, all contributing to the eccentric poetry of urban life. Audiences begin on East 4th Street before being drawn into La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre for a singular performance featuring original music by the Lazours and costume creations by Machine Dazzle.
The culminating event of En Garde Arts' 40th Anniversary Season, Days to Remember Forever is a testament to decades of friendship and collaboration. For nearly forty years En Garde Arts & La MaMa have championed and produced Bogart and Mee's earliest work, giving these seminal creators artistic homes that nurtured their groundbreaking artistry. This homecoming brings these institutions, and these artists, back together for a once-in-a-generation world premiere.
Come curious. Stay close. Love will be there, doing what it does best: making a scene.
Uncommon Voices
Projects in development
Taxilandia: Brooklyn
Created and Conceived by Modesto Flako Jimenez
The 2025 JDFA recipient, Flako Jimenez, is commissioned to create a new version of his hit piece, Taxilandia, an immersive play that delves into the specific and localized impacts of gentrification on artists and communities by driving audiences in a dollar van through Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East New York.
objects of decadence
Created and written by Chisa Hutchinson
A site-specific commission by playwright Chisa Hutchinson, this new play takes on the fraught history of museum curation and its deep ties with colonization and historical extraction. To be performed immersively at a New York City museum, Objects of Decadence asks questions about ownership, history, and preservation.
TOKITAE
Created & Directed by Taibi Magar
Puppetry Design by Amanda Villalobos
Tokitae by Taibi Magar (OBIE, Is God Is, 2018), developed in consultation with the Lummi Nation, tells the story of captive orca Tokitae and the quest of the people of the Lummi Nation to return her home to the Salish Sea. Through a collaboration with award-winning puppeteer Amanda Villalobos, Magar incorporates puppetry and projection design to bring Tokitae to life. Magar received En Garde Arts’ 2024 Joan D. Firestone Award, and TOKITAE will have its first workshop in the fall of 2025.
Spanglish Sh!t
Book and Lyrics by Samora La Perdida
Music by Josiah Handelman, Matthew Zwiebel, and Mobéy Lola Irizarry
Produced by En Garde Arts
SPANGLISH SH!T tells the story of Brujita, a trans Puerto Rican witch.on a journey through memory, myth, and migration—from the lush hills of Puerto Rico to the cul-de-sacs of suburban New Jersey.
As her journey unfolds, so does a deeper reckoning: with colonization, queerness, family, and the whitewashed ghosts of her past. Bold, bilingual, and fiercely funny, SPANGLISH SH!T is a spellbinding new musical that collides political satire with Caribbean folklore, and ancestral memory with radical imagination.
Samora la Perdida (she/they) is a trilingual creator and performer. She starred in the 2022 Off-Broadway productions of Soho Rep’s Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language at Signature Theatre, as well as Tina Landau’s A Transparent Musical at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023. Her TEDxTalk, “Do Latines Need to Speak Spanish? Finding Your Lost Mother Tongue,” features spoken word and music from her upcoming bilingual brujería musical: Spanglish Sh!t. Spanglish Sh!t has been developed with Berkeley Rep, NYSCA and En Garde Arts. Her queer Spanglish rap opera, pato, pato, maricón, debuted at Ars Nova ANT FEST in 2018. Its tour of tristate area public schools was documented in the BRIC TV series Going in With Brian Vines. la Perdida graduated from LaGuardia HS as a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and from Carnegie Mellon University with a dual degree in Drama and Global Studies.
The revolution will be bilingual.
Who cares?
Created and written by Camila Madero
In her newest project, tri-lingual Argentinian American actress, playwright, and illustrator Camila Madero captures the delicate and vital realities of intergenerational friendship. Inspired by real life experience and testimony, Madero tells the story of the deeply human bond between Carol, who navigates the fog of dementia; Lonny, her fiercely devoted husband, battling his own health issues while bearing the burden of primary care-giving; and Dalia, a young woman who must navigate her artistic ambition through an eye-opening encounter with the realities of elders aging, friendship, and care in the U.S. today. As these three New Yorkers are drawn together by a serendipitous chemistry and a shared passion for beauty, humor, and language, Madero’s piece explores intergenerational friendship as a lifeline in choppy waters.